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Amazon's Mechanical Turk: A New Source of Inexpensive, Yet High-Quality, Data?
Abstract
Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a relatively new website that contains the major elements required to conduct research: an integrated participant compensation system; a large participant pool; and a streamlined process of study design, participant recruitment, and data collection. In this article, we describe and evaluate the potential contributions of MTurk to psychology and other social sciences. Findings indicate that (a) MTurk participants are slightly more demographically diverse than are standard Internet samples and are significantly more diverse than typical American college samples; (b) participation is affected by compensation rate and task length, but participants can still be recruited rapidly and inexpensively; (c) realistic compensation rates do not affect data quality; and (d) the data obtained are at least as reliable as those obtained via traditional methods. Overall, MTurk can be used to obtain high-quality data inexpensively and rapidly.
© The Author(s) 2011.
... MTurk is an online crowdsourcing platform where participants can complete multiple human intelligence tasks, for monetary compensation. The use of MTurk increases accessibility for understudied and marginalized populations, such as REM individuals or people with disabilities (Buhrmester et al., 2016;Lund et al., 2018). Several reports have shown that data collected from MTurk have consistently demonstrated good to strong psychometric properties, such as internal or test-retest reliability and validity, especially among those with chronic pain (Buhrmester et al., 2016). ...
... The use of MTurk increases accessibility for understudied and marginalized populations, such as REM individuals or people with disabilities (Buhrmester et al., 2016;Lund et al., 2018). Several reports have shown that data collected from MTurk have consistently demonstrated good to strong psychometric properties, such as internal or test-retest reliability and validity, especially among those with chronic pain (Buhrmester et al., 2016). To ensure the participants' quality, only those who lived in the United States and had at least a 90% approval rating on previous tasks, or human intelligence tasks, were able to view and access the survey. ...
Objective: Psychosocial interventions for racial and ethnic minority (REM) individuals with chronic pain have largely focused on adjusting to and coping with discrimination rather than empowerment and advocacy to contest discrimination and injustice. Scholars have called for the empirical shift from harm reduction to a strength-based and empowerment approach to help REM individuals not only survive but also thrive in an oppressive society. This study examines the moderating role of critical consciousness (CC), a theoretical construct that promotes individuals’ awareness of injustice (i.e., critical reflection) and motivates them (i.e., critical motivation) to take action and advocate for themselves and their communities (i.e., critical action). CC has been found to potentially moderate the adverse effects of ethnic discrimination on REM individuals’ psychological and health-related outcomes. Research Method: Grounded in empirical and theoretical evidence, this study tested three moderated meditation models to examine if three components of CC would moderate the adverse associations between perceived ethnic discrimination and pain severity via perceived pain injustice. Results: The results indicated that critical reflection and action significantly moderated the association between perceived ethnic discrimination and perceived pain injustice. However, perceived pain injustice was not significantly associated with pain severity. Participants with higher levels of critical reflection and action reported higher perceived pain injustice at all levels of perceived ethnic discrimination. Conclusions: The findings suggest that critical reflection and action could exacerbate the association between ethnic discrimination and perceived pain injustice.
... Participants ranged in age from 18 to 67, with a mean age of the sample being 29.4 and a standard deviation of 9.15. The questionnaire was distributed through Mechanical Turk, an online survey-distribution tool which, although technically a volunteer-based sampling technique, has been determined to provide high-quality generalizable data at least as reliably as traditional random sampling techniques (Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011). Questionnaire items include questions measuring perceptions of nerds in general as well as of five specific characters from current and recent popular television programs. ...
... Mechanical Turk, with each participant receiving reimbursement of $.25 upon satisfactory completion of the questionnaire. This reimbursement amount, while seemingly small, was assessed as sufficient to obtain approximately four hundred accepted responses in less than three days (Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011); the average completion time for this questionnaire was 11 minutes and 31 seconds. After the requisite number of questionnaires was collected, the survey was closed on Amazon.com"s ...
This study explores the representation of nerds and geeks in popular broadcast television programs over the course of the past twenty years. A content analysis of the five most popular scripted broadcast television programs for each year was conducted in order to assess the frequency of nerd characters, as well as the social competence, physical attractiveness, and demographic information of each such character. In addition, a supplemental survey design study was employed in order to collect public opinion data regarding perceptions of nerds in general and on television. The results of these studies indicated that while the per-year frequency of nerd portrayals has not varied significantly, nerds have been consistently portrayed as overwhelmingly white and male. Nerd characters in popular television programs have grown more physically attractive over the past twenty years. Furthermore, while technological or computer-related expertise remain significant predictors for the identification of television characters as nerds by audience members, the same is true for unattractiveness and low social competence. Considered through the theoretical framework provided by past mass media scholars, these findings suggest that nerds represent a group of individuals consistently portrayed as possessing technical aptitudes which are highly desirable in the current social context, but that such roles are portrayed as accessible only to white males.
... Our previous quantitative evaluations were performed by comparing the grounding orientations and orientations estimated from the generated images using OrientAnything [67]. While its orientation estimation performance is highly robust (as seen in all of our qualitative results), we additionally conduct a user study to further validate the effectiveness of our method based on human evaluation performed by 100 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk [9]. Each participant was presented with the grounding orientation, the input prompt, and the images generated by (1) Zero-1-to-3 [46], (2) C3DW [11], and (3) ORIGEN. ...
... User Study Results. 3D orientation-grounded text-toimage generation results of ORIGEN was preferred by 58.18% of the participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk[9], significantly outperforming the baselines[11,46]. ...
We introduce ORIGEN, the first zero-shot method for 3D orientation grounding in text-to-image generation across multiple objects and diverse categories. While previous work on spatial grounding in image generation has mainly focused on 2D positioning, it lacks control over 3D orientation. To address this, we propose a reward-guided sampling approach using a pretrained discriminative model for 3D orientation estimation and a one-step text-to-image generative flow model. While gradient-ascent-based optimization is a natural choice for reward-based guidance, it struggles to maintain image realism. Instead, we adopt a sampling-based approach using Langevin dynamics, which extends gradient ascent by simply injecting random noise--requiring just a single additional line of code. Additionally, we introduce adaptive time rescaling based on the reward function to accelerate convergence. Our experiments show that ORIGEN outperforms both training-based and test-time guidance methods across quantitative metrics and user studies.
... A total of 610 participants were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). MTurk allows researchers to collect high-quality data rapidly among demographically diverse individuals (Buhrmester et al., 2011). Prior work has shown that MTurk can be reliably used to make inferences about a number of broader populations of interest (Coppock, 2019;Huff and Tingley, 2015;Johnson and Ryan, 2020). ...
... The influence of sociocultural, religious, moral, and ideological affiliations on risk and benefit sensitivity could also be examined. Finally, while prior research suggests that wellscreened survey data collected via Mechanical Turk can be representative of data acquired in a person (Buhrmester et al., 2011), future in-person studies could test for generalization. ...
Ethical judgments require clinicians, researchers, research participants, and patients to weigh risks and benefits. Novel treatments for cognitive deficits are rapidly emerging, but little is known about how individual differences in risk and benefit sensitivity influence ethical judgments to administer treatments. The public plays important roles as citizens, taxpayers, and consumers of cognitive treatments, yet little is known about how they evaluate risks and benefits in ethical judgments. We examined the influence of risk and benefit sensitivity on the public’s choices about treating cognitive dysfunction. We administered surveys, cognitive measures, and an ethical judgment paradigm to 425 participants recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants were asked to choose whether to recommend a hypothetical cognitive treatment with varying degrees of risks and benefits across seven different cognitive domains. We expected participants to be more risk-sensitive than benefit-sensitive, especially when evaluating treatments that influence cognitive functions central to personal identity such as mood, self-control, and long-term memory. Unexpectedly, participants were slightly more sensitive to benefits and showed inter-domain stability across cognitive dysfunctions. Our results suggest that risks and benefits influence whether the public might recommend cognitive treatments. The relatively higher weight placed on benefits could be explained by prominent theories of decision-making under risk. Overall, this study suggests that judgment tasks can be adapted to study psychological ethical choices about treatments for cognitive deficits. Further study of individual variation in risk and benefit sensitivity and their influence on real-world ethical choices about cognitive repair could inform frameworks to enhance optimal neuroethical decision-making.
... Researchers across the social sciences often collect data via online surveys. These research efforts have been aided by crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, Qualtrics, Prolific Academic, Crowdflower, and so on (Buhrmester et al., 2011;Mason & Suri, 2012;Paolacci et al., 2010;Peer et al., 2017). Along with social media, these platforms make data collection easy, fast, and quite often inexpensive. ...
... Since the inception of such data collection platforms, there has been ongoing research and sometimes concerns regarding data quality (Buhrmester et al., 2011;Crump et al., 2013;Fort et al., 2011;Goodman et al., 2011;Peer et al., 2022). The existence of financial incentives for completing online studies may lead some participants to complete as many surveys in as little time as possible. ...
While online survey data collection has become popular in the social sciences, there is a risk of data contamination by computer-generated random responses (i.e., bots). Bot prevalence poses a significant threat to data quality. If deterrence efforts fail or were not set up in advance, researchers can still attempt to detect bots already present in the data. In this research, we study a recently developed algorithm to detect survey bots. The algorithm requires neither a measurement model nor a sample of known humans and bots; thus, it is model agnostic and unsupervised. It involves a permutation test under the assumption that Likert-type items are exchangeable for bots, but not humans. While the algorithm maintains a desired sensitivity for detecting bots (e.g., 95%), its classification accuracy may depend on other inventory-specific or demographic factors. Generating hypothetical human responses from a well-known item response theory model, we use simulations to understand how classification accuracy is affected by item properties, the number of items, the number of latent factors, and factor correlations. In an additional study, we simulate bots to contaminate real human data from 35 publicly available data sets to understand the algorithm’s classification accuracy under a variety of real measurement instruments. Through this work, we identify conditions under which classification accuracy is around 95% or above, but also conditions under which accuracy is quite low. In brief, performance is better with more items, more categories per item, and a variety in the difficulty or means of the survey items.
... accessed date on 2 January 2025) exemplify the power of crowdsourcing by connecting vast labor resources to companies for fulfilling micro-tasks at relatively low costs. Leveraging the massive number of internet users, Amazon Mechanical Turk sustains a large and diverse crowd to perform tasks such as human-subject surveys, data annotation, and data cleaning and verification, thereby accelerating the development of artificial intelligence-related projects [43]. Similarly, Samasource, founded in 2008, taps into the exponentially growing global internet user base by employing low-income workers in developing countries to provide high-quality, large-scale training data for profit [44]. ...
... accessed date on 3 March 2025) exemplify the power of crowdsourcing by connecting vast labor resources to companies for fulfilling micro-tasks at relatively low costs. Leveraging the massive number of internet users, Amazon Mechanical Turk sustains a large and diverse crowd to perform tasks such as humansubject surveys, data annotation, and data cleaning and verification, thereby accelerating the development of artificial intelligence-related projects [43]. Similarly, Samasource, founded in 2008, taps into the exponentially growing global internet user base by employing low-income workers in developing countries to provide high-quality, largescale training data for profit [44]. ...
Crowdsourced manufacturing, which has emerged as a pivotal paradigm in the era of Industry 4.0, redefines traditional production models by leveraging decentralized decision-making and collaborative networks. This paper reviews the evolution of the open business model in the manufacturing sector and examines fundamental issues toward a holistic framework of crowdsourced manufacturing. Crowdsourced manufacturing is enacted through a full product fulfillment value chain encompassing value capturing, creation, and delivery through cooperation among various manufacturer crowds, open innovators, and platforms. The workflow of crowdsourced manufacturing involves these decision agents working collaboratively to achieve a synergy of networked information and material flows. An industrial example of tank trailer crowdsourced manufacturing is presented to illustrate the key concepts and clarify the primary technical issues of crowdsourced manufacturing.
... Second, the study was advertised in the Mechanical Turk (MTurk) interface, which is an online platform facilitated by Amazon where researchers can advertise and invite potential participants to paid studies (n = 60 participants recruited for the study via this method). The MTurk has been validated as a tool to be used in conducting research, 40,41 and has been used as a recruitment method in research with Arab-Americans.↱ 42 Indeed, MTurk may enhance accessibility to research participation by reaching individuals who might otherwise be excluded, such as those residing outside major metropolitan areas, and individuals from underrepresented groups.↱ ...
... This observation aligns prior research indicating positive relationships between religiosity and mood, but not chronic pain-related outcomes such as disability. 27,41 This finding may be attributable to the complexity and multidimensionality of religiosity as a construct,↱ 27 and that the questionnaire used in the current study might be limited in capturing the meaning of religiosity related to CLBP physical and functional outcomes (e.g., the items assess how much the individual is committed to activities like wearing religious symbols or marrying someone from the same religion). In turn, religiosity may affect disability indirectly via other factors that have not been accounted for in the current analyzes (e.g., ...
... Existing literature on incentives is contradictory. Researchers have found that offering an incentive results in higher completion rates MORFORD,GONZALEZ,AND RISSER 2 compared to no incentive (e.g., LaRose & Tsai, 2014); yet, other studies have indicated that the amount of the incentive does not have a linear correlation with valid completion rates in online surveys (e.g., Buhrmester et al., 2011;Göritz, 2006). So, how do investigators decide what amount to offer? ...
Online survey studies have become an increasingly popular method of data collection, particularly within behavioral sciences. Though there are many benefits, many challenges also arise when using internet recruitment to conduct online studies. There is a paucity of peer-reviewed guidance on how to protect data against these challenges. We present a detailed account of our online recruitment and survey methodology when recruiting adults (n = 241) for a study on a sensitive topic requiring anonymous data collection. We evaluated the influence of two compensation amounts (15 USD) and three online recruitment sites on data validity. The results indicated that both the type of recruitment site and the compensation amount influenced the likelihood that participants would provide a valid survey. The findings have implications for the development of best practice guidelines for online studies and to provide recommendations for future studies using online recruitment and data collection.
... Evaluations find general consistency of results using MTurk populations with classic work in their respective fields that use more traditional subject populations. For studies that describe the use of the MTurk marketplace in its first wave of use in political science and psychology, see Berinsky et al. (2012) and Buhrmester et al. (2011), respectively. In economics, Horton, Rand, and Zeckhauser (2012) replicate three classic experiments in economics (a dictator game, the Asian disease problem, and a priming effects experiment) and a simple test of labor supply with MTurk and find comparable estimates to existing work. ...
In a field experiment where revelation of co-worker earnings and the shape of the earnings distribution are exogenously controlled, I test whether relative earnings information itself influences effective labor supply and labor supply elasticity. Piece-rate workers shown their peer earnings standing provide significantly more labor effort. However, the productivity boost from earnings disclosure disappears when inequalities in the underlying piece rate exist. By cross-randomizing net of tax piece rates, labor supply elasticity with respect to the net of tax wage is also estimated. Unlike labor level, I find this labor elasticity is unchanged by the relative standing information. Taken together, these findings have direct implications for how to best model relative status concerns in utility functions, supporting some and precluding other common ways. More speculatively, they also suggest social comparisons could be strategically used to grow firm output or the tax base, and, that underlying inequalities in compensation schemes inhibit the ability of social comparisons to incentivize work.
... 827 participants provided a complete dataset. Data collected on MTurk have been shown to be similar in quality to data samples collected in-lab in college if appropriate quality assurance steps are taken (Buhrmester et al. 2011;Necka et al., 2016;Paolacci et al., 2010). Excluded from the analysis were 24 participants because of failed attention check items, i.e., items intended to ensure that participants were devoting appropriate attention to the task, such as an item that asked participants to "Please select 'strongly agree'" as their response, gave the same response on all items in a given page, and completed the survey in less than 10 min. ...
Despite numerous studies devoted to mathematics aptitude and achievement, research on how individuals experience math has remained relatively fragmented. Here, using a combined theoretical and data-driven approach, we sought to characterize self-reported math experiences, with a particular focus on negative math experiences. An examination of existing literature led to the identification of eight potential facets of math experiences: emotional, cognitive, physiological, behavioral, testing, classroom/social performance, self-efficacy, and attitudinal. We generated survey items intended to probe experiences within each of these facets and constructed a preliminary questionnaire of 107 candidate items, comprising positively and negatively framed statements about one’s math experiences, with data from a final analytic sample of N = 803 adult participants. Focusing on negative items, four key factors emerged from the data: negative attitudes and avoidance, physiological experiences, testing and educational experiences, and cognitive and emotional experiences. These results point to opportunities for contact between literatures (e.g., between negative attitudes and avoidance behaviors), and toward relatively unexplored topics, such as the importance of negative physiological experiences when facing math. On a practical level, we also provide short subscales with sound internal metrics for each of the four factors identified above. Taken together, this work may prove useful on both a theoretical and a methodological level for those looking to develop a unifying framework of negative math experiences.
... However, it may also introduce measurement error due to the less controlled environment and the absence of consistent in-person experimenter explanations and result in incomplete data sets due to higher attrition rates (Gillan & Rutledge, 2021;Newman et al., 2021;. Despite these challenges, a growing body of research indicates that online cognitive task assessments demonstrate comparable test-rest reliability to that of in-person assessments (Backx et al., 2020;Buhrmester et al., 2011;Hansen et al., 2016) and show potential for predictive clinical utility (McInnes et al., 2023). Overall, the multifaceted nature of design factors underscores the specificity of our conclusions to our task design. ...
Computational psychiatry aims to quantify individual patients’ psychiatric pathology by measuring behavior during psychophysical tasks and characterizing the neurocomputational parameters underlying specific decision-making systems. While this approach has great potential for informing us about specific computational processes associated with psychopathology, the fundamental psychometric properties of computational assessments remain understudied. Optimizing these psychometric properties, including test–retest reliability, is essential for clinical utility. To address this gap, we assessed the test–retest reliability of manifest behavior and computational model parameters of a probabilistic reward and reversal learning task, two-armed Bandit, using intraclass correlations (ICCs) in 179 adults, including those with various psychosis-spectrum disorders and undiagnosed controls. We studied two computational models from recent literature: regression modeling of choice strategies and a hidden Markov model. The test–retest reliability for both manifest behavior (0.24 ≤ ICCs ≤ 0.54) and computational parameters (0.30 ≤ ICCs ≤ 0.61) ranged from poor to moderate, which was not explained by practice effects. Computational parameters did not outperform manifest behavior parameters. The reliability of computational parameters was generally—though not significantly—higher in healthy adults, which may potentially reflect the internal heterogeneity of categorical psychiatric diagnoses. Computational modeling holds promise, but tasks and analyses must be optimized for greater reliability before proceeding into clinical use.
... To assess the psychometric properties of the B-Scan 360 LF, we collected data from two different samples recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk; www.mechanicalturk.com) which has been shown to provide robust and valid data (Buhrmester et al., 2011) superior to student samples for projects requiring professional diversity among subjects. Institutional ethics approval has been obtained for this project. ...
Research on individuals with dark personalities in the work context has received much attention in the past ten years. However, one challenge remains: creating valid measures that focus on and capture the personality profile of those individuals with possible psychopathic features. The B-Scan 360 Long Form (LF) is a measure of psychopathy created for the workplace and used by others to describe a co-worker, an employee, or a supervisor. Two studies were conducted using online samples to assess the factor structure and validity of the instrument. Results indicated that B-Scan 360 LF facets were internally consistent and unidimensional. Confirmatory factor analyses supported a reliable fifteen facets and four-factor model consistent with the Psychopathic Checklist-Revised four-factor model of psychopathy. The B-Scan 360 LF showed similar patterns of association with FFM traits as other psychopathy measures. The B-Scan 360 LF correlated negatively with supervisor Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Emotional Stability. Correlations between the B-Scan 360 LF and Openness were positive. However, correlation between B-Scan 360 LF and Extraversion was non-significant. Although more research is needed to establish the validity of the B-Scan 360 LF, we believe these results show that it is a promising option to measure psychopathy in the workplace.
... Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk). MTurk was selected based on the high diversity of its respondent pool [26], given that participant diversity is highly desirable in the initial phase of scale construction [27]. Respondents were selected for participation if they reported having previously collaborated with team members with diverse, difficult-to-integrate perspectives. ...
... Much of this research focuses on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), likely because it is one of the most frequently used platforms [5,8]. MTurk provides a large participant pool, reasonable cost, flexibility regarding research design, accessibility and efficient data collection [5], and can provide quality data [9,10]. However, MTurk is also susceptible to inattentive workers, misrepresentation by workers, workers with inconsistent English language fluency, and vulnerability to code used to automatically complete surveys (i.e., bots) [2,5,11]. ...
Online surveys often include quantitative attention checks, but inattentive participants might also be identified using their qualitative responses. We used the software Turnitin™ to assess the originality of open-ended responses in four mixed-method surveys that included validated multi-item rating scales (i.e., constructs). Across surveys, 18-35% of participants (n = 3,771) were identified as having copied responses from online sources. We assessed indicator reliability and internal consistency reliability and found that both were lower for participants identified as using copied text versus those who wrote more original responses. Those who provided more original responses also provided more consistent responses to the validated scales, suggesting that these participants were more attentive. We conclude that this process can be used to screen open-ended responses from online surveys. We encourage future research to replicate this screening process using similar tools, investigate strategies to reduce copying behaviour, and explore the motivation of participants to search for information online, including what sources they find compelling.
... MTurk was selected because it provides a diverse and relatively representative sample of the general population, allows for efficient and cost-effective data collection, and has been widely used in social science research. Data collected on MTurk has been proven to be as reliable as those obtained from traditional survey methods (53)(54)(55). ...
Introduction
Social media plays a crucial role in shaping health behaviors by influencing users' perceptions and engagement with health-related content. Understanding these dynamics is important as new social media technologies and changing health behaviors shape how people engage with health messages.
Aim
The current study explored the relationship between the characteristics of content creators, the messaging strategies employed in social media, and users' engagement with social media content, and whether these features are linked to users' behavioral intentions.
Methods
This study adopts a cross-sectional survey design. A total of 1,141 participants were recruited. We have developed a structural equation model to investigate the relationships between the characteristics of content creators, the messaging strategies employed in social media, users’ perceived HBM constructs, user engagement, and users' behavioral intentions.
Results
Results revealed that social media posts focusing on self-efficacy were linked to increased willingness to engage in healthy behaviors. Additionally, individuals who demonstrate stronger perceptions of HBM constructs—such as higher perceived susceptibility and benefits of vaccination—are more likely to engage with posts, which was associated with higher vaccination intention. Posts authored by celebrities garnered a relatively higher number of favorites, while a greater proportion of politicians as content creators was linked to increased user comment intention.
Conclusion
Our study underscores the potential of integrating the Health Belief Model into social media to help promote health behaviors like the COVID-19 vaccination. Furthermore, our findings offer valuable insights for professionals and policymakers, guiding them in crafting effective message strategies and selecting appropriate sources to promote health behaviors on social media platforms.
... Prolific.co, a fee-for-service panel, was used for data collection. Prolific attracts diverse samples across the United States and globally and has been found satisfactory in collecting high-quality data from nationally representative samples despite some drawbacks [33,34]. The survey opportunity was listed to prospective subjects on Prolific.co ...
Background: Robust evidence indicates that having few or poor-quality social connections is associated with poorer physical health outcomes and risk for earlier death (Snyder-Mackler N, Science 368, 2020; Vila J, Front Psychol 12:717164, 2021).
Aim: This study sought to determine whether recent attention on social connection and loneliness brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic may influence risk perception and whether these perceptions were heightened among those who are lonely.
Methods: Two waves of online survey data were collected. The first included data from 1,486 English-speaking respondents in the US, UK, and Australia, and a second sample of 999 nationally representative US adults, with a final sample of 2392 respondents from the US and UK.
Results: Perceptions of risk have remained consistent, underestimating the influence of social factors on health outcomes and longevity, even among respondents who reported moderate-to-severe levels of loneliness.
Conclusions: Despite heightened awareness and discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic, public perception in the US and UK continues to significantly underestimate the impact of social factors on physical health and mortality. This underestimation persists regardless of individual loneliness levels, underscoring the need for enhanced public education and policy efforts to recognize social connection as a crucial determinant of health outcomes.
... Researchers have demonstrated that MTurk is a powerful tool used to collect reliable and valid data in social science (Buhrmester et al., 2011;Casler et al., 2013;Farrell et al., 2017;Hauser & Schwarz, 2016). However, increasing concerns regarding accessing quali ed participants and validating collected data have also been raised recently. ...
Associating esports teams with a particular city has gained significant attention, with the assumption that es- ports teams receive benefits from the local fanbase as traditional sports teams take advantage of the local com- munity. The researchers examined whether team identification was important in esports as it is in traditional sports and tested if local and nonlocal fans showed different levels of team identification after localization. The results of path analyses revealed that team identification had a positive impact on team loyalty and consumer behavior. Additionally, team loyalty mediated the positive impacts of team identification, and local residency was a significant moderator, strengthening the effects of team identification. Furthermore, a mixed-model ANCOVA showed that local fans’ team identification was higher after localization but no changes occurred in nonlocal fans’ team identification. The findings provide empirical evidence that localizing in esports could be beneficial yet occurs without the expected tradeoffs of estranging nonlocal fans.
... Institutional ethics approvals were obtained prior to the commencement of all participant recruitment. One thousand six hundred individuals were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, an online panel that provides demographically diverse samples while providing data quality comparable to student samples (Buhrmester et al., 2011). To minimize cross-cultural lifestyle variation, only US participants were recruited, with each participant compensated US$1.00 for completing the study. ...
Purpose
This study aims to investigate whether giving consumers choice over which ads they watch before accessing online content can enhance their attitude toward the advertised brand and the overall viewing experience.
Design/methodology/approach
All participants were shown a pre-roll ad before watching a focal piece of content, but some participants were randomized to receive an illusory (Study 1) or actual choice (Study 2–3) over which ad they would watch.
Findings
Pre-roll ad choice enhanced brand attitude and attitude toward the overall viewing experience (Study 1–3), but only when consumers could choose between ads from competing brands (Study 2). These advantageous effects arose through the mediating influence of empowerment (Study 1–2), but only among those with a negative attitude toward online advertising (brand attitude and attitude towards the viewing experience; Study 3) or who had limited interest in purchasing from the product category being advertised (brand attitude; Study 3).
Research limitations/implications
Potential rebound effects, where consumers become more critical of any disliked ads that they selected for viewing, were not examined.
Practical implications
Pre-roll ad choice allows consumers to tailor their online viewing experience, benefitting not only the brands that leverage it (through enhanced brand attitude) but also the online platforms that implement it (through enhanced attitude toward the viewing experience).
Originality/value
Pre-roll ad choice acts as a salve to the disruption of goal pursuit that such ads normally engender by generating feelings of empowerment. By extension, consumers for whom pre-roll ads do not disrupt goal pursuit do not respond to ad choice.
... Research has shown that MTurk participants provide data that is as reliable as data collected through more traditional methods (Buhrmester et al. 2011), that MTurk participants perform better on attention checks than college students (Hauser and Schwarz 2016), and that using CloudResearch screener tools significantly improves data quality (Hauser et al. 2022). As such, we used CloudResearch's "Approved Participants" list to limit participation in our study to high-quality MTurk participants (Hauser et al. 2022). ...
Aims. The Community Attitudes Towards Mental Illness scale (CAMI) is widely used to measure authoritarianism, benevolence, social restrictiveness, and community mental health attitudes held by general populations and medical professionals. This study compares the fit of published alternative factor structures of the CAMI to a general population English-speaking sample and examines what mental illnesses individuals think about when responding.
Methods and Results. Using data from 749 US MTurk participants, confirmatory factor analysis supported a modified version of Morris' (2012) structure — fear/exclusion, social control, and goodwill — χ2(183)=1094.44, p<.001, RMSEA=.08, CFI=.90, SRMR=.06. Most participants (73.6%) considered specific mental illnesses, with bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia most common. Some found challenges defining mental illness.
Conclusions. Comparing structures of a widely cited tool and identifying what respondents think about while completing the scale assists the many researchers using the CAMI. This clarifies our understanding of community stigma and improves our capacity to reduce it.
... Online behavioral research has thrived over the last two decades, thanks in no small part to the proliferation of crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and Prolific (Berinsky et al., 2012;Buhrmester et al., 2011;Litman et al., 2017;Palan & Schitter, 2018;Peer et al., 2017). These widely utilized platforms have dramatically reduced the resources required for data collection, thus revolutionizing how researchers across disciplines collect data (Chandler & Shapiro, 2016;Zhou & Fishbach, 2016). ...
Online crowdsourcing platforms such as MTurk and Prolific have revolutionized how researchers recruit human participants. However, since these platforms primarily recruit computer-based respondents, they risk not reaching respondents who may have exclusive access or spend more time on mobile devices that are more widely available. Additionally, there have been concerns that respondents who heavily utilize such platforms with the incentive to earn an income provide lower-quality responses. Therefore, we conducted two studies by collecting data from the popular MTurk and Prolific platforms, Pollfish, a self-proclaimed mobile-first crowdsourcing platform, and the Qualtrics audience panel. By distributing the same study across these platforms, we examine data quality and factors that may affect it. In contrast to MTurk and Prolific, most Pollfish and Qualtrics respondents were mobile-based. Using an attentiveness composite score we constructed, we find mobile-based responses comparable with computer-based responses, demonstrating that mobile devices are suitable for crowdsourcing behavioral research. However, platforms differ significantly in attentiveness, which is also affected by factors such as the respondents’ incentive for completing the survey, their activity before engaging, environmental distractions, and having recently completed a similar study. Further, we find that a stronger system 1 thinking is associated with lower levels of attentiveness and acts as a mediator between some of the factors explored, including the device used and attentiveness. In addition, we raise a concern that most MTurk users can pass frequently used attention checks but fail less utilized measures, such as the infrequency scale.
Supplementary information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13428-025-02618-1.
... and compensated with $0.25. It has been found that data collected from Amazon's Mechanical Turk site is as reliable as data gathered through traditional methods (Buhrmester et al., 2011). All participants were drawn from the United States. ...
There are competing predictions about the role of denying mental and emotional states to enemies in predicting support for violence against them. Classical views suggest that “mind denial” of any group, including enemies, should reduce moral inhibitions against harming them, enabling violence to occur. However, recent research argues that mind denial increases support for instrumental aggression, wherein perpetrators hold no animus toward potential victims but harm them to achieve some other end, but mind denial does not increase support for moralistic aggression, wherein perpetrators wish to harm enemies whom they think morally deserve it. Here, we replicate prior results in the context of an active conflict: Israeli drone strikes in Gaza. We find that mind denial of Palestinian civilians killed as collateral damage predicts support for drone strikes, but mind denial of Hamas terrorists does not predict support.
... Prolific allows researchers to set parameters including pet ownership. The quality of data collected through platforms like Prolific is higher than typical Internet samples and meets the psychometric standards considered acceptable for published research (Buhrmester et al., 2011). ...
Pet ownership is widespread in the United States, yet little research has explored the relationship between pet ownership and political views. Given recent political discourse, particularly narratives and stereotypes pertaining to “childless cat ladies,” this study investigates how dog and cat ownership may correlate with political affiliation, views on abortion, and voting intentions for the 2024 US Presidential election. An anonymous, cross-sectional online survey was conducted using Prolific, with a sample of 954 US adults. Participants provided demographic data, information about pet ownership, and responded to questions regarding political affiliation, concerns about current issues, abortion views, and voting intentions. Life satisfaction was measured using the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS). Statistical analyses included Chi-square tests, ANOVA, and regression models to assess associations between pet ownership, political views, and sociodemographic factors. Significant associations were found between pet ownership and political identity. Cat owners were more likely to self-identify as liberal, support abortion rights, and plan to vote for the Democratic ticket (Harris/Walz) compared to dog owners, owners of both cats and dogs, and non-pet owners. LGBTQ+ participants also reported more liberal views and stronger support for abortion rights than non-LGBTQ+ participants. Life satisfaction did not significantly differ by pet ownership or gender, contrary to popular stereotypes about cat owners. Pet ownership appears to be a unique predictor of political leanings and voting behavior. Cat owners were more likely to support liberal policies and candidates, while dog owners and those with both cats and dogs were more conservative. As pets play an increasingly visible role in US culture, understanding the intersection of pet ownership and politics offers new insights into voter demographics and ideological divides in contemporary elections.
... Furthermore, by default, participants were limited to those with access to the internet and competency with the Amazon Mturk platform. Although Amazon Mturk has been shown to be of good quality, with acceptable internal consistency, 54,55 test-retest reliability, 56 and interrater reliability within the sample, 20,57,58 the Mturk platform itself also has various limitations, including false answers, reliability bias, and possible sampling bias. Given the cross-sectional design of the study, there is a possibility of recall bias from respondents to the survey. ...
Background
Relationship changes after cancer are prevalent yet underexplored. This investigation aimed to assess factors influencing relationship changes between participants receiving the 2 most common gender-specific cancer diagnoses: breast and prostate.
Methods
Anonymous surveys were administered via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Eligible participants were 18 years or older and diagnosed with breast or prostate cancer. Relationship satisfaction and mental health were assessed via Personal Health Questionnaire Depression Scale (PHQ-8), General Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7), and Self-Esteem and Relationship Questionnaire.
Results
Of the 186 study respondents, 85.4% (159) had breast cancer and 14.5% (27) had prostate cancer. More breast cancer participants reported that their relationship worsened after cancer diagnosis (breast: 40.9%, prostate: 11.1%), whereas a majority of prostate cancer patients reported improved relationships (breast: 17%, prostate: 66.7%; P < 0.001). However, most participants reported no relationship status change (breast: 66.7%, prostate: 77.8%; P = 0.508) and remained with the same partner postdiagnosis (breast: 84.9%; prostate: 77.8%). Breast cancer participants reported higher self-esteem compared with prostate cancer participants ( P = 0.019). There was no significant difference in overall Self-Esteem and Relationship Questionnaire ( P = 0.140), PHQ-8 ( P = 0.689), and GAD-7 ( P = 0.871) scores. Average PHQ-8 and GAD-7 scores indicated moderate depression (breast: 12.62, prostate: 12.88) and moderate anxiety (breast: 10.96, prostate: 11.06).
Conclusions
Breast cancer participants reported greater perceived changes in their relationship postdiagnosis. This study supports routine, active, and pre-emptive involvement of a mental health provider for patients with cancer to improve mental health outcomes.
... Participants recruited through MTurk are often considered to produce more accurate data, as they tend to perform tasks with greater attentiveness and are drawn from a larger, highly filterable sample pool (Lowry et al., 2016). Empirical evidence further supports MTurk's ability to deliver high-quality data comparable to the psychometric standards of laboratory experiments (Buhrmester et al., 2011). Consistent with Mason and Suri's (2012) guidelines, we monitored participants' IP addresses, URLs, and browser cookies to mitigate the risk of duplicate account usage. ...
The passionate consumption of luxury products has emerged as a significant research focus, reflecting the growing interest in understanding consumer behavior in the high-value market. However, a comprehensive understanding of consumer desire for both authentic and counterfeit luxury products remains limited. This research aims to address two primary objectives: (a) to identify the various dimensions constituting the concept of desire for luxury products, and (b) to develop and validate the Luxury Desire Scale (LDS), exploring its relationship with preferences for authentic and counterfeit luxury products (ALP vs. CLP). Study 1 provided empirical support for the second-order four-factor model of luxury desire, encompassing desires for uniqueness, material resources, arousal, and status. Meanwhile, Study 2 revealed systematically different processes in preference formation between ALP and CLP, particularly in relation to the attitudinal functionality of luxury products represented by social-adjustive and value-expressive attitudes. This research offers implications for marketing theorists and provides actionable suggestions for managers in the realm of luxury consumption.
... Furthermore, mTurk provides access to a large, diverse, and geographically distributed pool, enabling researchers to gather responses efficiently and cost-effectively (Buhrmester et al., 2011;Paolacci and Chandler, 2014). To ensure the quality of data, the researchers restricted participation to individuals with a high approval rating (≥95%) and a minimum of 50 completed Human Intelligence Tasks, which are individual tasks completed by participants on the mTurk platform. ...
Product recalls, particularly when perceived as opportunistic, can trigger severe consumer backlash, undermining brand loyalty and escalating protest behaviors that threaten long-term consumer-brand relationships. This study integrates expectancy violation theory and situational crisis communication theory to understand the implications of opportunistic recalls for brand loyalty and repurchase intention. A survey with 425 responses from car owners in the United States was analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). It found that opportunistic recalls significantly exacerbate negative brand personality and directly influence protest behavior and brand loyalty. A counterintuitive finding emerges with protest behavior positively impacting brand loyalty, an insight that expectancy violation theory may help elucidate, indicating that protest actions may sometimes strengthen loyalty. The study also highlights the moderating role of perceived dialogical corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication in attenuating the negative impact of opportunistic recalls on negative brand personality, aligning with the precepts of crisis communication theory. However, its influence on protest behavior is found to be minimal. This interplay highlights the significance of adept perceived dia-logical CSR communication in mitigating the adverse effects of product recalls on brand perception. By integrating these theoretical lenses, the research contributes to crisis management, CSR, and consumer-brand relationships literature, providing practical implications for effectively employing CSR strategies in managing product recall crises, thereby sustaining brand loyalty and influencing future buying behavior.
... This study was approved by the University of Oklahoma Institutional Review Board (14271, "Workplace Concerns"), and data were collected during 2023. Given our research's purpose to demonstrate the prevalence of the workplace Karen phenomenon, we recruited participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), as it has been shown to be more diverse and representative of the US population than convenience samples (e.g., students), and to provide comparable quality responses (Buhrmester et al. 2011;Walter et al. 2019). The study was collected via CloudResearch, an online crowdsourcing platform, to improve MTurk data quality (e.g., blocking suspicious IP addresses and Geocode locations; Litman et al. 2017) and was only advertised to CloudResearch's approved participants, thus removing any MTurkers who regularly fail attention checks, provide bot-like responses, or have otherwise shown evidence of poor data quality (Hauser et al. 2023). ...
As research largely considers White women a race‐neutral gender group associated with generic feminine attributes (e.g., communality), there is a limited theoretical understanding of how their intersectional racial and gender identities might combine to shape their work experiences. Yet the recently emerged Karen trope—popularized on social media as White women who complain incessantly—deviates from generic feminine attributes and may have seeped into the workplace to potentially create unique work experiences for White women based on their race and gender. Using a mixed‐method design across three studies, we explore the implications of how the Karen trope has manifested within organizations. Our qualitative study revealed that employees have adopted this trope to label White female colleagues who prohibitively voice as workplace Karens, leading to various social penalties for these individuals. Integrating these preliminary findings with a stereotype activation and application lens, we develop a conceptual model of when White women (vs. men and non‐White women) conduct prohibitive voice, they activate a broader stereotype that White women are workplace Karens, causing observers to perceive them as having less organizational concern, which leads to lower promotability evaluations and decreased intent to rely on their voice. Using a series of experimental vignettes and a field study combining a critical incident technique with random assignment to experimental conditions, we find empirical support for our model. Our results enhance the theoretical and practical understanding of a rare context wherein Whiteness and gender interact to create negative work experiences for an otherwise advantaged social group.
... First, it should be noted that all four studies were conducted online, using the Prolific platform. Although the quality of data obtained from online labor markets has been questioned, different analyses have suggested that data collected on MTurk and Prolific Academic are valid and comparable to data collected via traditional methods (Buhrmester et al., 2011;Mason & Suri, 2012;Peer et al., 2017). Nevertheless, future research examining the interplay between mental imagery and emotions in the context of decision making under risk should be conducted in the laboratory setting to replicate the online effects. ...
... Prolific.co, a fee-for-service panel, was used for data collection. Prolific attracts diverse samples across the United States and globally and has been found satisfactory in collecting high-quality data from nationally representative samples despite some drawbacks [33,34]. The survey opportunity was listed to prospective subjects on Prolific.co ...
Background
Robust evidence indicates that having few or poor-quality social connections is associated with poorer physical health outcomes and risk for earlier death (Snyder-Mackler N, Science 368, 2020; Vila J, Front Psychol 12:717164, 2021).
Aim
This study sought to determine whether recent attention on social connection and loneliness brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic may influence risk perception and whether these perceptions were heightened among those who are lonely.
Methods
Two waves of online survey data were collected. The first included data from 1,486 English-speaking respondents in the US, UK, and Australia, and a second sample of 999 nationally representative US adults, with a final sample of 2392 respondents from the US and UK.
Results
Perceptions of risk have remained consistent, underestimating the influence of social factors on health outcomes and longevity, even among respondents who reported moderate-to-severe levels of loneliness.
Conclusions
Despite heightened awareness and discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic, public perception in the US and UK continues to significantly underestimate the impact of social factors on physical health and mortality. This underestimation persists regardless of individual loneliness levels, underscoring the need for enhanced public education and policy efforts to recognize social connection as a crucial determinant of health outcomes.
... Although MTurk currently provides access to a diverse participant pool, changes in its platform dynamics over time could affect the representativeness of samples. To enhance external validity and achieve a more comprehensive representation of mindfulness profiles in the general population, future research should diversify recruitment efforts to include participants from sources such as universities and clinical settings (Buhrmester et al., 2011). An experimental approach, where mindfulness profiles are assessed before and after a mindfulness intervention, would allow for comparison of specific effects within each profile, adding practical applicability. ...
Objectives
In this study, we aimed to (1) examine profiles of mindfulness using the short form of the FFMQ (FFMQ-SF), (2) identify the demographic predictor (i.e., sex) of mindfulness profile membership, and (3) examine associations of mindfulness profiles with psychological outcomes (i.e., anxiety and depressive symptoms).
Methods
This cross-sectional study included 604 individuals recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform (MTurk). We performed latent profile analyses (LPA) to explore the individual profiles based on scores on dispositional mindfulness facets. Dispositional mindfulness was measured using the Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire-Short Form (FFMQ-SF). Depression was assessed using the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9). Anxiety symptoms were measured by the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7).
Results
We identified three mindfulness profiles including, Judgmentally Describing, Low Mindfulness, and Non-Judgmentally Describing. Participants in the Low Mindfulness group were more likely to be women compared to the other two profiles (Judgmentally Describing and Non-Judgmentally Describing groups). Participants in the Low Mindfulness group had the highest levels of anxiety and depressive symptoms, whereas individuals in the Non-Judgementally Describing group had the lowest levels of depression and anxiety.
Conclusion
In the present study, we demonstrated three profiles of the FFMQ-SF, which had differential relationships with anxiety and depressive symptoms. Consideration of such profiles may help clinicians to develop more fine-tuned mindfulness-based psychological interventions.
A compelled disclosure mandatory reporting policy approach requires all or nearly all university employees to report any sexual assault they learn about to university officials, regardless of the victim/survivor's wishes. Although rare, some universities have implemented policies that require the victim/survivor's consent to the report (i.e., consented disclosure ). This mixed method study examined support for a compelled disclosure versus consented disclosure policy approach in a sample of college students ( n = 640) and non‐student adults ( n = 405). Quantitative data examined whether sexual victimization and trust in university response to sexual assault reports were associated with policy preference. Qualitative data examined participants’ explanations for their policy preference. Most participants preferred consented over compelled disclosure , and college students and those with less trust in university response to reports were especially likely to support consented disclosure . Reasons for supporting consented disclosure predominantly centered on survivors, focusing on the importance of survivor choice and wellbeing. Those who supported compelled disclosure predominantly focused on individuals other than the survivor (e.g., the perpetrator, other students), personal beliefs about crime and punishment, and assumptions about the benefits of compelled disclosure . Findings highlight the importance of including a greater diversity of perspectives in mandatory reporting policy development.
Patent law encourages inventors to label their products as “patented,” to mark their legal status and potentially secure monetary damages from infringing competitors. We examine whether such labels might have a separate and direct impact on consumers, by affecting how they view patented products and influencing what they purchase. We develop and conduct two experiments to isolate the impact of patent status on consumer behavior. In an online randomized experiment, we demonstrate how increasing the salience of patent status heightens consumers' beliefs that products are innovative and well made. We also reveal consumers' surprisingly sophisticated understanding of the patenting process and what being patented means. Despite this informed perspective, consumers are not more inclined to buy patented products. To determine if these results hold in a real‐world setting, we conduct a field experiment at a small retail pharmacy chain. Using scanner data spanning over 4 years, we find no evidence that consumers respond to increased patent salience. Our collective results suggest that while consumers view patented products as more innovative and well made, these positive attributes do not necessarily translate into heightened purchasing behavior. Our research suggests that patent marking might often serve only a legal, rather than a marketing, function. This has implications for patent policy, including the relevance of patent salience in damage analyses and litigation strategies.
Screening tools commonly used for psychological distress among cancer patients have high rates of false positives, thus warranting a brief, detailed screening measure of distress. This study assessed the feasibility, acceptability, reliability, and validity of the Psychological Distress Profile (PDP) in an online sample of cancer patients. One hundred and seventy-four participants with a self-reported diagnosis of cancer were included in this study. Participants completed the study via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Results yielded high ratings of acceptability, ease of completion, and willingness to complete the PDP. The PDP demonstrated high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = .94). The PDP depression subscale had large positive correlations with the PDP hopelessness subscale ( r = .84, p < .001), PHQ-9 ( r = .67, p < .001), and CES-D ( r = .67, p < .001). The PDP anxiety subscale had large positive correlations with the PROMIS Emotional Distress-Anxiety-Short Form ( r = .68, p < .001) and GAD-7 ( r = .70, p < .001). Finally, the PDP anger subscale had a large positive correlation with the PROMIS Emotional Distress-Anger-Short Form ( r = .76, p < .001). The mean PDP total score ( N = 174) was 69.0 ( sd = 16.4). The PDP total score demonstrated a small, significant positive correlation with the DT ( r = .21, p = .005) and is likely more sensitive to distress associated with depression, hopelessness, anxiety, and anger. The PDP emerges as a theory-driven distress assessment tool for use with cancer patients.
Companies use emoticons in the content of their brand fan pages as a means to enhance their relationships with consumers. Few studies have been conducted on how emoticons work on Facebook brand fan pages. In addition, previous research on emoticons does not provide any obvious mechanism for emoticons’ effects, and their findings also have certain limitations as a result that reveal mixed results. This study was designed to clarify the mechanism for emoticons’ effects. Two studies were conducted in total. In Study 1, we conducted a one-way ANOVA on 82 subjects recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and PROCESS macro model 4 for the mediation analysis. We confirmed that emoticons lowered the perceived functional value of brand fan pages and increased the perceived hedonic value. In addition, we found that the influence of emoticons on consumer attitudes toward brand fan page was only mediated by the hedonic value. In Study 2A, which examined the influence of product type and brand status, we conducted a 2 (emoticons) × 2 (product type) × 2 (brand status) ANOVA on 233 subjects recruited through Amazon MTurk, and contrast analysis and PROCESS macro model 6 were used for the interaction effect analysis and mediation analysis. We found that the positive effect of emoticons only occurred in utilitarian products with high brand status and hedonic products with low brand status. Study 2B, conducted using an Instagram version, yielded results identical to those of Study 2A. Finally, this study’s theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Purpose
This research aims to examine two different types of service agents and the moderating role of restaurant types in the relationship between service agent types (human vs robot) and consumer satisfaction. This research also investigates the mediating role of trust in the relationship.
Design/methodology/approach
To test the proposed mediated moderation hypotheses, this research adopts a 2 × 2 between-subject experimental design. In total, 196 respondents were collected using an online platform, Amazon Mechanical Turk, from the residents of the United States of America. The data analysis results show that the proposed preference and consumer trust in the service agent type differ according to the restaurant type they dine at.
Findings
The findings suggest that human service agents are perceived as being more trustworthy and enhance consumers’ satisfaction in an upscale restaurant setting. In contrast, robot service agents are perceived as being more trustworthy and, in turn, increase consumer satisfaction in a casual restaurant context. This research provides restaurant managers and marketing practitioners with guidance on how and when to leverage the appropriate service agent type to drive consumer trust in service and satisfaction.
Originality/value
Robotic restaurants, an automation-based business, have recently gained worldwide notice. However, no attempt was made to examine the dimensionality of consumer trust and satisfaction toward service agent types in the restaurant industry.
Why people develop prejudice has been under the spotlight of many political and social psychological studies. The current contribution bridges the gap between individual and contextual perspectives and conceptualizes attitudes as joint products of personal ideologies and social norms, as such adopting a person‐within‐context approach. In two US samples (total N = 1150), representative in terms of age, gender, ethnic background (Studies 1–2), and political orientation (Study 2), we examined whether perceived levels of Right‐Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) in one's close groups (family, friends, colleagues, and people in one's town) were related to outgroup warmth and avoidance through one's own RWA and SDO. We also included norm enactment as a moderator of close‐group ideologies' effect on one's own ideologies. The results showed that close‐group ideologies were positively linked to participants' own RWA and SDO, which, in turn, were associated with lower outgroup warmth and higher outgroup avoidance in both studies. Most importantly, these effects were strongest for those who have a high desire to enact close‐group norms, and weakest for those who have a low desire for norm enactment. These findings highlight the significance of situating personal ideologies within their contextual plenum while studying intergroup relations.
Objective: Sleep concerns are common in children but often go untreated. Help-seeking models suggest that for children to receive health care, their caregivers must: recognize the problem, decide to seek help, and select a service. The current study aimed to fill gaps in the literature by examining caregiver problem recognition and help-seeking for behavioral sleep concerns in childhood. Methods: Data were collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Participants were 219 caregivers of children ages 7–12 who provided information about help-seeking and their child’s sleep. Results: Nearly half of the children in the sample had clinically significant sleep concerns based on caregiver responses to the CSHQ. Only 38% of the caregivers of children with clinically significant sleep difficulties accurately recognized their child’s sleep as problematic. Of caregivers who identified sleep as a problem for their child, only 42.6% had spoken with anyone about their concerns. Severity of the sleep problem and caregiver experience with mental health predicted problem identification and help-seeking. Specialty behavioral health services were underutilized with nearly 80% of caregivers indicating that they had or would seek help from their child’s pediatrician but less than 25% indicating that they had or would seek help from a therapist or psychologist. Conclusion: Results support previous findings that children’s sleep problems are under-recognized and under-treated. Future research and clinical work is needed to close the gap between the need for services and service use.
Purpose
This study aims to explore the underlying mechanism and boundary conditions of consumer’s preference on a multiple-percentage discount over an economically equivalent single discount.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors tested their predictions using two large-scale online experiments accompanied by a fully controlled laboratory experiment.
Findings
This study shows that the preference for a multiple-percentage discounts over an economically equivalent single-percentage discount is because consumers directly add the raw values of multiple-percentage discounts. The preference is less prominent if the percentage discounts are presented using round (vs non-round) numbers and is strengthened by experiential-thinking style.
Research limitations/implications
This study examined consumer preferences between a single-percentage discount and an economic equivalent multiple-percentage discount. A promising research topic is exploring consumer preferences between multiple-percentage discounts.
Practical implications
Understanding how different presentation formats of the same price discount can lead to different evaluations enables managers and marketers to ensure a more effective promotional strategy.
Originality/value
This study extends literature on price-based promotions by demonstrating how consumers’ preferences for multiple discounts can be strengthened or weakened.
Purpose
There is a lack of application of the adult learning theories as a framework to explore how mentors can encourage mentees to practice different workplace learning approaches. The purpose of this study is to construct and present evidence for the validity and reliability of a scale termed workplace learning in mentoring (WPLM).
Design/methodology/approach
Study 1 generated items for the WPLM through multiple phases, including input from graduate students ( n = 132) and subject matter experts ( n = 15). Study 2 focused on validating the scale using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to establish a final factor structure. A series of validation analyses (predictive, convergent and discriminatory) were conducted using regression, correlations and structural equation modeling (Sample 1 = 379; Sample 2 = 212).
Findings
In Study 1, the authors generated items and examined content validity, resulting in a four-factor, 20-item scale. Study 2 refined the final WPLM scale to three factors with 15 items. Validation analyses indicated that the WPLM had strong predictive, convergent and discriminatory validity. Specifically, it significantly predicted mentoring satisfaction and quality, converged with traditional, relational and negative mentorship constructs, and was distinct from relationship and personal learning in mentoring.
Research limitations/implications
While this study advances the understanding of WPLM, future research should explore more diverse samples, as the participants were predominantly Caucasian from the global north. Further research should also examine the role of specific work contexts and how mentors create conditions for different learning approaches.
Originality/value
This study highlights the importance of mentors’ role in encouraging learning as an organizational outcome that enriches employees by enhancing their knowledge, skills and abilities.
La presente investigación utilizó la Teoría de la Amenaza Intergrupal (ITT, por sus siglas en inglés) para examinar hasta qué punto las percepciones de amenaza de los inmigrantes mexicanos indocumentados predecían las actitudes hacia las políticas de inmigración. Conceptualizamos la amenaza intergrupal como amenaza simbólica, amenaza realista, ansiedad, estereotipos negativos, y ampliamos las investigaciones previas de la ITT mediante la evaluación de estereotipos positivos. Dos de las cuatro medidas dependientes no fueron específicas del país de origen: opiniones sobre la política general de inmigración y posturas favorables a la inmigración. Las dos medidas específicas del país incluyeron opiniones sobre políticas que afectan directamente a la inmigración procedente de México y el acuerdo para proporcionar a los inmigrantes mexicanos recursos básicos en los centros de detención. Planteamos la hipótesis de que la amenaza simbólica, la amenaza realista, la ansiedad y los estereotipos negativos predecirían opiniones más punitivas en todas las medidas de resultados, mientras que los estereotipos positivos predecirían posturas más favorables. El estudio reclutó a 175 adultos estadounidenses a través de Amazon Mechanical Turk. En los análisis de regresión, la amenaza simbólica tuvo correspondencia con posturas más punitivas en todas las medidas dependientes, excepto en las posturas favorables a la inmigración. La amenaza realista predijo una política general punitiva y menores posturas favorables a la inmigración. La ansiedad predijo opiniones más duras sobre las políticas generales y específicas de México. Los estereotipos mostraron evidencia de efectos predictivos únicos: los estereotipos negativos predijeron opiniones punitivas sobre las políticas generales y específicas de México, mientras que los estereotipos positivos se relacionaron con posturas más favorables a la inmigración y con el apoyo para proporcionar recursos en detención (y con opiniones sobre políticas generales ligeramente menos punitivas). El modelado exploratorio de ecuaciones estructurales reveló que sólo la amenaza simbólica predecía las posturas sobre las políticas generales y específicas de México, y sólo los estereotipos positivos predecían las opiniones sobre los recursos en detención. La presente investigación pone en evidencia las maneras diferenciadas en que las percepciones de amenaza intergrupal, incluyendo los estereotipos positivos, se asocian con las posturas con respecto a la inmigración.
Hashtags are integral to conversations and discussions on social media and are used to communicate emotions and meaning. However, little is known about how hashtags form impressions of social media users' personalities, credibility, and attractiveness. This study utilizes Social Information Processing Theory (SIPT) to examine if impressions can be formed about the sender based on their use of hashtags on social media. A between-subjects post-test-only experimental design was implemented in which participants (N = 322) viewed mock Instagram posts that differed in the number of hashtags utilized (low vs. high) and framing (positive, negative, neutral) and completed assessments on source perceptions of extraversion, neuroticism, narcissism, trustworthiness, and social attractiveness. Posts with a high number of positive hashtags were associated with higher perceptions of extraversion. Posts with positive hashtags made the source perceived as more socially attractive and trustworthy than those with neutral and negative hashtags. This research significantly advances theory by extending tenets of SIPT to understand how hashtags influence person perception on social media.
The present study examined search strategies that those in need of mental health services might use to select a provider. Specifically, 176 participants were recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk and asked to imagine a scenario in which they had taken a job in a new city and had begun feeling isolated and depressed to the point that they decided to seek the services of a mental health provider. Participants responded to a survey that queried their likelihood of using various referral sources based on a five-category Likert-style response scale. An exploratory factor analysis yielded four main factors of potential referrals: promotional sources, nonmedical professional sources, traditional healthcare providers, and personal sources. These factors were then explored using multivariate analyses. The implications of these findings for providing pathways to greater access to mental health services as well as limitations of the study and future research directions are discussed.
L-77, a nonionic organo-silicone block copolymer surfactant, significantly increased [ ¹⁴ C]GA 3 uptake and physiological effects of GA 3 on ‘Marsh’ seedless grapefruit, as compared with the commonly used surfactant Triton B 1956. Effects on fruit strength at harvest were assessed by testing rheological parameters and evaluating peel color. Corroborating results also were obtained in field trials with ‘Minneola’ tangelo and ‘Clementine’ tangerine. Using L-77, even one single fall application of 1 ppm GA 3 proved commercially effective.
Indicates that research in social psychology has largely been based on college students tested in academic laboratories on academiclike tasks. How this dependence on one narrow data base may have biased the main substantive conclusions of sociopsychological research in this era is discussed. Research on the full life span suggests that, compared with older adults, college students are likely to have less crystallized attitudes, less formulated senses of self, stronger cognitive skills, stronger tendencies to comply with authority, and more unstable peer-group relationships. These peculiarities of social psychology's predominant data base may have contributed to central elements of its portrait of human nature. According to this view, people are quite compliant and their behavior is easily socially influenced, readily change their attitudes and behave inconsistently with them, and do not rest their self-perceptions on introspection. The data base may also contribute to this portrait of human nature's strong emphasis on cognitive processes and to its lack of emphasis on personality dispositions, material self-interest, emotionally based irrationalities, group norms, and stage-specific phenomena. The analysis implies the need both for more careful examination of sociopsychological propositions for systematic biases introduced by dependence on this data base and for increased reliance on adults tested in their natural habitats with materials drawn from ordinary life. (127 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The relationship between financial incentives and performance, long of interest to social scientists, has gained new relevance with the advent of web-based "crowd-sourcing" models of production. Here we investigate the effect of compensation on performance in the context of two experiments, conducted on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (AMT). We find that increased financial incentives increase the quantity, but not the quality, of work performed by participants, where the difference appears to be due to an "anchoring" effect: workers who were paid more also perceived the value of their work to be greater, and thus were no more motivated than workers paid less. In contrast with compensation levels, we find the details of the compensation scheme do matter---specifically, a "quota" system results in better work for less pay than an equivalent "piece rate" system. Although counterintuitive, these findings are consistent with previous laboratory studies, and may have real-world analogs as well.
The rapid growth of the Internet provides a wealth of new research opportunities for psychologists. Internet data collection methods, with a focus on self-report questionnaires from self-selected samples, are evaluated and compared with traditional paper-and-pencil methods. Six preconceptions about Internet samples and data quality are evaluated by comparing a new large Internet sample (N = 361,703) with a set of 510 published traditional samples. Internet samples are shown to be relatively diverse with respect to gender, socioeconomic status, geographic region, and age. Moreover, Internet findings generalize across presentation formats, are not adversely affected by nonserious or repeat responders, and are consistent with findings from traditional methods. It is concluded that Internet methods can contribute to many areas of psychology.
Wettability of the leaf surface, surface tension of the liquid, and stomatal morphology control penetration of stomata by liquids. The critical surface tension of the lower leaf surface of Zebrina purpusii Brückn. was estimated to be 25 to 30 dyne cm(-1). Liquids having a surface tension less than 30 dyne cm(-1) gave zero contact angle on the leaf surface and infiltrated stomata spontaneously while liquids having a surface tension greater than 30 dyne cm(-1) did not wet the leaf surface and failed to infiltrate stomata. Considering stomata as conical capillaries, we were able to show that with liquids giving a finite contact angle, infiltration depended solely on the relationship between the magnitude of the contact angle and the wall angle of the aperture. Generally, spontaneous infiltration of stomata will take place when the contact angle is smaller than the wall angle of the aperture wall. The degree of stomatal opening (4, 6, 8, or 10 mum) was of little importance. Cuticular ledges present at the entrance to the outer vestibule and between the inner vestibule and substomatal chamber resulted in very small if not zero wall angles, and thus played a major role in excluding water from the intercellular space of leaves. We show why the degree of stomatal opening cannot be assessed by observing spontaneous infiltration of stomata by organic liquids of low surface tension.
The effects of octylphenol (OP) and four of its ethoxylated derivatives on uptake into, and distribution within, maize leaf of 2-deoxy-glucose (2D-glucose), atrazine and o, p′-DDT are reported. The surfactants and OP (2 g litre−1 in aqueous acetone) increased the uptake, at both 1.5 and 24 h, of the three model compounds (applied at 1 g litre−1) having water solubilities in the g, mg and μg litre−1 ranges. The uptake of 2D-glucose was positively correlated with the hygroscopicity of the surfactants. The uptake of DDT and atrazine increased with the uptake of the surfactants, being inversely related to their hydrophile:lipophile balance (HLB). Uptake of 2D-glucose and atrazine was enhanced at high humidity, the relative enhancement for atrazine increasing with increasing ethylene oxide (EO) content of the surfactants. A significant proportion of the atrazine and DDT entering the leaf was recovered from the epicuticular wax, the amount of atrazine recovered from the wax increasing with the EO content of the surfactants. The proportion of the surfactants taken up which was recovered from the epicuticular wax was minimal at an EO content of 12.5–16 mole equivalents. The appearance of the deposits on the leaf surface differed markedly among the surfactants, with similar trends for all three chemicals and without visible evidence for infiltration of the stomatal pores. The total quantities of glucose and atrazine translocated were increased by all surfactants but that of DDT was not, despite increases in uptake of up to 7.5-fold. Relative translocation (export from treated region of leaf as a percentage of chemical penetrating beyond the epicuticular wax) was reduced in all cases in the presence of surfactant. Up to 30% of the applied [14C]chemicals was not recovered from the treated leaf after 24 h. The reduced recovery of 2D-glucose, but not that of atrazine and DDT, was largely attributable to movement out of the treated leaf, with approximately 70% of the chemical taken up being translocated basipetally. Loss of atrazine and DDT was a result of volatilisation. There was no evidence that either [14C]2 D-glucose or [14C]atrazine was metabolised to [14C]carbon dioxide.
Selected properties of octylphenol and seven of its ethoxylated derivatives were studied as a preliminary to investigating their effects on the foliar absorption of three model compounds and the surfactants themselves. Surface tension of the surfactants (2 g litre−1 in water) increased with their hydrophile:lipophile balance (HLB) which is a function of oxyethylene (EO) content. The surface tension of the aqueous surfactants was inversely related to the cosine of their contact angle (θ) on maize leaf in the EO range 7.5–30. Cos θ was in turn related to the wetting of maize by aqueous acetone solutions of surfactants with EO >9.5. The critical surface tension required for complete wetting of the adaxial surface of maize leaf was estimated to be 29 mN m−1. Evaporation of drops of aqueous acetone solutions was biphasic, with preferential loss of acetone during the initial, more rapid phase. The rate of evaporation from the remaining, effectively aqueous systems was inversely related to the HLB of the surfactants. Phytotoxicity of the surfactants, as measured by ethylene production, increased with decreasing EO, while their hygroscopic water retention increased with both log EO and relative humidity (r.h.). Aqueous solubilities of pentacosane, DDT and atrazine were increased up to 8-fold by surfactant (20 g litre−1). Maximum solubilities were observed with surfactants having intermediate HLB values. The solubility of pentacosane (maximum 221 μg litre−1) indicated that the surfactants would probably not solubilise more than 0.1% of the epicuticular wax when applied to maize leaf. Scanning electron microscopic observation of leaf surfaces exposed to surfactants for 24 h did not reveal any visible modifications of the wax structure. Volatilisation of DDT was reduced in the presence of surfactants but that ofatrazine was increased, although in inverse proportion to its solubility in aqueous surfactant.
Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers - often implicitly - assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these "standard subjects" are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species - frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior - hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges.
Gibberellin treatment for yellows-infected sour cherry trees
- Kg Parker
- Lj Edgerton
- Hickey
Prevention of flowering and promotion of spur formation with gibberellin increases cropping efficiency in ‘Montmorency’ sour cherry
- Mj Bukovac
- J Hull
- Jr
- Cd Kesner
- Larsen
Artificial intelligence: With help from the humans. The New York Times
- J Pontin
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